Freefall Page 6

“In what way?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Cliff was either a master of intrigue or a petulant duffer. I decided we should play more before I made up my mind.

  Cliff studied his fingernails as I gave him the background we’d gathered on the Easts, Baker and Cavalcade. So I made sure to include enough detail in my description of the electrocution of Bruce Tyson to make Cliff’s chinless jaw drop a little. He brightened at my telling of the drowning of Baker’s partner, Jean-Paul Marais.

  “Do you know that in French, marais means swamp, or bog?” he said.

  I counted to ten, as Jack had advised me to do before swinging punches, and then I went on to explain the media reports of trouble for Cavalcade during the Global Financial Crisis and Baker’s subsequent solo navigation of the business into apparently rude financial health.

  “And the point of all this?” Cliff said, turning his gaze back to his fingernails. He trimmed one with a small pair of scissors and looked pleased with the result.

  “Listen, Clifford. At risk of interrupting your beauty treatment, your friend Claire Styler has been abducted and sexually assaulted, at least one man’s been murdered, my family has been threatened, and a young man is sitting in a prison psych unit with a mutilated face and a fucked-up brain after lying about a crime he committed. All these events trace back to John Baker and Charles East. Do you think there might be something shifty going on that could make a decent yarn for The Citizen?’

  Cliff sat up straight and put his scissors in his desk drawer.

  I looked him in the eyes. “So, for a start, I want to know what makes Baker tick – and who pulled him out of the financial marais, as you call it.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve had a bit of a tummy bug. It’s affected my concentration.”

  “Do you want to go home?”

  “Let’s work.”

  Cliff rejuvenated himself with a fizzy vitamin pill in a glass of water. Over the course of the morning, he and I trawled The Citizen’s database and nosed around the internet. We learned Baker kept a low public profile, despite having some flashy pursuits like the polo ponies and yachts. Baker was single, and heterosexual as far as we could tell. Married once, then divorced. There was a twenty-eight-year old daughter, Anita Baker, from the short-lived marriage, drifting around somewhere.

  Baker owned a house on the banks of The Thames in the Hammersmith bankers’ belt that he purchased for 15 million British pounds in 2009. He also owned a farm in Surrey where he housed his polo ponies. Le Monde in France reported on a corporate party a few years ago when Baker purchased a US$50 million super yacht called Electra2 that he kept anchored in Monaco Bay. Two French Government Ministers and a handful of banking chief executives from London and Paris had attended the Monaco soiree. The Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s second son, Saif, was at the party too. Cliff thoughtfully reminded me, in case I didn’t know, that Muammar was killed in the Libyan wave of the Arab Spring uprisings.

  We found press photos of John K. Baker with senior executives from Baker’s former employer, the giant French bank BKB Nouveau, posing at the BKB Nouveau de L’Arc de Triomphe horse race in Paris. In one snap, Baker and his old BKB pals were standing with a former World Bank President, Rene Gasquet, and a dark-skinned man with hair styled in a classic 1970s coif, enhanced by a black moustache. The pic was taken in 2012.

  “Is there a name in the photo caption for the guy wearing the caterpillar on his lip?” I said.

  “Appears not,” said Cliff.

  “You reckon the real Saddam Hussein was hung from the gallows for war crimes in Baghdad in 2006, or is that him at the races with that lot?” I said.

  “I see what you mean,” said Cliff. “I’ll ask the PR people at BKB if they can ID him. I have an in there.”

  “So you’re close to BKB?”

  “Gar, BKB is a bank with over 100,000 employees in more than 100 countries. They have more than a dozen PR people schmoozing and boozing every business journalist in the city of London. I’m not special.”

  “BKB may have been the ones who hauled Baker out of the shit of the GFC. We need to get inside their door and find out - without ringing their alarm bells. Stealth is our friend right now.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t ask their PR people about the photo?”

  “Let’s hold fire for now.”

  “OK. But I can tell you right now that Cavalcade and BKB are still close. I’ve got evidence.”

  “Such as?”

  He shuffled papers on his desk and extracted a glossy brochure. “Baker’s speaking at this BKB investment conference this week at the Dorchester Hotel.”

  Cliff’s media invite to The New Silk Roads conference said the event was by invitation only for a select group of global investment leaders. BKB was courting executives who managed the world’s major pension funds, both private and those controlled by governments and trade unions. They were after people who managed the retirement savings of hundreds of millions of workers.The brochure said: Delegates will hear about opportunities to profit from projects to build roads, airports and new cities in South America, North Africa, India and China. Cavalcade’s John K Baker will share his insights from more than three decades as an investment visionary growing his clients’ wealth in an ever-changing world.

  “I want to attend,” I said.

  “I’ll call BKB now and give them your name. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  “Best not to do that, Cliff. I’ll just turn up with you.”

  “Stealth?” I nodded. The date was in two days’ time. Tomorrow I was going to Bath to meet Sarah Kerr. I thanked Cliff for his help. He went to the staff room to make a coffee while I took photos on my phone of the photos we’d found of Baker and his friends.

  I headed back to Brighton, wondering if I could trust Cliff McDonald because I had caught sight of another invitation on his desk while he was making coffee. One he clearly didn’t want to talk about. It was in his drawer actually: a ticket to BKB’s corporate suite at de L’Arc de Triomphe horse race in Paris in two weeks’ time, return business class air tickets, and a booking confirmation for two nights stay at Le Meurice, one of the city’s best hotels, free of charge. That little package could buy a lot of favours if handed to the right personality, and Cliff looked like he had it in spades.

  XVII

  THE HEAD OFFICE of the Cavalcade Investment Group was sparsely furnished. It’s location on the 35th floor of the famed Gherkin building in the City of London’s financial district was statement enough for its co-founder and chairman, John K Baker, who strode into the office and hugged and kissed the standing girl who had been waiting for him.

  They sat opposite each other in orange-coloured leather armchairs beside a window, a glass-topped coffee table in the shape of a teardrop separating them.

  “You look well,” he said. The girl replied by sucking an ice cube from a glass of water and crunching it with her molars. He persisted, “A business suit suits you, if you’ll excuse the pun.”

  “So why can’t I kill him?”

  “You have been spending too much time with that lunatic in Sydney.”

  “He gets the job done.”

  “Oh, yes. A nice job he did on that psychiatric nurse. Do you know that man phoned my office? Several times. How he found my numbers, I do not know. What do you think is going to happen if the police investigators find that man’s phone, or records, with my contact details in it, and the dates and call times?”

  The girl crunched more ice, and ran her fingers nonchalantly through her short, platinum blond hair.

  Baker sat forward in his seat, put his elbows on his knees, and zoomed his eyes in on hers. “You do know that he called my office – after he was meant to be dead!”

  “What?”

  “Yes, I had a ghost on the line, it seems. Or there’s someone else who knows too much. My God, you’ve let things fall to pieces since you allowed Henry East to jump off the rails. And now you want to kill a journali
st. As if that won’t draw a crowd.”

  “You’re the genius. What do you want me to do?”

  “Be smarter. Come up with a better plan. You’ve tracked him to the UK, haven’t you?”

  “He’s staying in Brighton with his mother-in-law and his children.”

  “Well, work on his family. He’s a normal human being, isn’t he, with all those parenting instincts coursing through his veins? We need to know what he has on us, and we need to pressure him to hit the delete button. Everyone has a price.”

  “Not everyone, John. You seem to forget what you did five years ago and why.”

  “Okay,” he said, raising his eyebrows and massaging his forehead at the memory of his ex-business partner, and the night he was lost at sea. “If we need to delete Hart, we will delete him. But let’s try a little more sophistication in the meantime. I mean, for Christ’s sake, wrapping a man’s head in wire and electrocuting him?”

  “It’s creative.”

  “It’s psychopathic.”

  “Are you worried Seth might come after you, John?”

  “Should I be?”

  The girl smiled. “I have some tricks up my sleeve for Mr Hart and his loved ones.” She stood up. “I will be in touch.”

  “Don’t I get a kiss?” he said.

  She approached the seated man, who for as long ago as she could remember had wanted her to call him father. She avoided his offered lips and dabbed her own dryly upon his right cheek.

  XVIII

  I CAUGHT a morning train from Brighton to London Bridge, but this time I rode the underground to Paddington Station where I boarded an overground carriage with a table upon which I put my iPad and take-away coffee. It was a ninety-minute ride north to Bath. For the first thirty minutes, a braying mob of well-upholstered, name-tagged tourists wearing matching parkas and track pants ensured everyone else on the carriage knew their names and what their itinerary was for the day. I was gutted that they didn’t mention the Crystal Palace where I was meeting Sarah Kerr. Gutted.

  I read on my iPad about John K. Baker’s role in The New Silk Roads conference, drafting questions I might put to him, wondering when and if I should grill him about Bruce Tyson. The rhythm of the train put me into a trance and I dozed, opening my eyes now and then to peer outside upon south-west England flickering past against an endless grey sky: cottages with thatched roofs, brick-box council flats and bitumen car parks, grassy paddocks spotted with sheep and cows, patches of forest, motorways streaming with lorries and cars.

  Around midday, I stepped from Bath railway station and started walking up a wide, cobblestoned corridor into the historic, Roman-built centre of the city. The offspring of globalisation, housed in grand Georgian sandstone buildings, soon flanked me on all sides: mostly shopfronts for banks, fast-food chains and pop fashion houses. Near the Roman Baths, a pretty female gladiator in a leather tunic and sandals waved a shield at me advertising American donuts.

  Sarah Kerr was drawing smoke from a long, ebony cigarette holder when I arrived in the cobblestoned square of Abby Green that housed the Crystal Palace pub. I recognised her from the cigarette holder she said she’d be carrying. As I closed in, I guessed she was in her late fifties or early sixties. She wore a dark trouser suit and open-necked blue shirt with a voluminous, red-and-white polka-dot hanky tucked in the top pocket of her jacket.

  I introduced myself and we took a window table inside the pub with a bottle of Bordeaux, a cheese platter with mixed olives and a crisp baguette to share. Closer up, Sarah had a lot of youth in her face, which surprised me because of her smoking, which appeared to be a serious relationship from the way she fondled her holder. She seemed to know this about her face, putting it on full display by pinning her hair into a high bun. She examined me with large, dark, almond-shaped eyes.

  “I’ve studied you online,” I said. “Want to know anything about me?”

  “I phoned Kate Halliday this morning. I know you were married to Malcolm’s daughter. You’re a little volatile. You have children, a boy and a girl.”

  “And a three-legged dog,” I said, wondering what other personality traits of mine Kate had volunteered.

  Sarah raised her eyebrows.

  “He lost it in a hunter’s trap,” I said.

  She sipped her wine. “And now you are the hunter, Gar.”

  “More a fisherman right now. Bill Crewes told me someone offered to bail John Baker and Jean-Paul Marais out of trouble during the GFC. He didn’t get around to telling me who. But he said Marais didn’t like the deal, so Baker drowned him, or had him drowned.”

  “Bill has dementia, Gar. And that’s a serious charge, murder. People have been sued for much smaller defamations.”

  “So Bill was dreaming it up?”

  Sarah took a sip of wine. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  We stepped outside into the square. Sarah tucked a cigarette into her holder and lit up. Her fine-featured face was how I imagined Audrey Hepburn would look in Breakfast at Tiffany’s with age on her clock.

  “Okay. So who do you think saved Cavalcade?”

  “The Egyptians.” Sarah took a long drag on her cigarette, removed it from her holder and squashed it under the toe of her dagger-heeled black shoe. She’d wasted most it.

  “I’m trying to give up,” she said. “More wine?”

  I purchased another bottle of Bordeaux at the bar and placed it on our table, opened my briefcase and put my notebook and my voice recorder next to it.

  “We’re off the record?” she asked quizzically.

  “Of course. No attribution. I just have a shocking memory.”

  “That’s handy sometimes,” she said, winking. “Anyway, heard of the Arab Spring?”

  “I don’t have a degree in it.”

  She grinned. “Headline: 2011. The people revolt. It starts in Tunisia, spreads to Algeria, Oman, Jordan, then Egypt, where it really erupts. Next it rumbles across Libya and Syria. The people got sick of despots standing on their throats with designer boots. The mood spreads to Eastern Europe. The Ukrainians throw that Russian puppet Yanukovych out of his Kiev palace but he just scurries off to Moscow, with some gold in his pockets, into the embrace of Vladimir Putin. Putin rolls his tanks into Crimea to stop the rot. On it goes.”

  “Your point?” I said.

  “The dictators see these breakdowns coming. You don’t think they take out lifestyle insurance?”

  “By that you mean they stash money, preferably where their enemies can’t find it.”

  “Bingo,” said Sarah. “On an industrial scale.” She clinked her glass on mine.

  This sort of caper was Charles East’s act to a tee. It was no secret that, for a fee, he helped the Chinese elite move wealth, and a selection of their children, overseas in case they fell foul of the ruling regime at home. If the shit hits the fan and the parents are put in a box of some sort, dead or alive, having a child or two planted OS would keep their precious DNA flowering richly elsewhere.

  “So when you say you suspect the Egyptians had a funding deal going on with Baker and Cavalcade, who do you mean exactly?”

  “The big papers in London started reporting Cavalcade was set to go bust because of the GFC. Jean-Paul Marais dies. Cavalcade is flush with cash again a few months later, but it withdraws from the Brighton marina deal. So Bill Crewes and I decided to see what was going on. Bill found a trail. I was helping. We found hints of Arab oil money going into Cavalcade, some of it from Egypt before the Mubarak regime collapsed.”

  “What can you give me?” I said. “Any documents?”

  “Nothing concrete; you know that Bill burnt his files and now his brain is broken.”

  “But you have the knowledge.”

  “Some of it.”

  Sarah’s phone rang. As she spoke, her smile gave way to an expression of pain. “I’m coming, darling,” she said and hung up. “I’m sorry, Gar. I have a friend. She’s ill.” Sarah handed me a sheet of folded paper from her handbag. “Homework,” she
said. She stopped to light a cigarette outside my window, waved, and tottered away like a long-legged waterbird, trailing smoke across the uneven paving stones.

  I plugged the cork back in the half-finished bottle of wine, stuffed it in my briefcase and walked to the train station. As the train rolled off to London, I rummaged in my briefcase for the music player I’d loaded with Miles Davis tunes that I’d forgotten to give to Malcolm. I put the ear plugs in and selected a French film noir soundtrack. The wafting trumpet of the track Generique touched me where I reckoned the night sirens touch Fish and prompt his singing. I sensed Malcolm wanted to talk, so I phoned his hospital room. The nurse said he’d just fallen asleep.

  I unfolded Sarah’s homework. It was a copy of a newspaper clipping from The Washington Observer:

  Egypt’s top prosecutor has notified governments around the world that former Finance Minister Karim Iskandar and his family may be involved in the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of cash, gold and other state-owned valuables.

  Prosecutor General Mahmoud Rasekh said that Iskandar and his sons, Anwar and Kafr, may have violated laws prohibiting the seizing of public funds and profiteering and abuse of power by using complex business schemes to divert the assets to offshore companies and personal accounts.

  This was good reading and deserved an accompaniment. I extracted the wine bottle from my briefcase, unplugged the cork and had a swig. A few passengers shook their heads. “Cheers,” I said to no-one in particular and had another swig, ignoring the little voice that was nagging inside my head for me to put the cork back in. I thought something about Arabs and genies and bottles.

  Iskandar and his close friend, President Hosni Mubarak, were key strategic allies of the United States for decades until Mubarak was forced from power in the wake of national protests and international pressure. The sum of the assets alleged to be appropriated by the Iskandar family and others — more than $200 billion — far exceeds earlier estimates and might be wildly exaggerated. Previous figures for the amount allegedly stolen by the Iskandars range from $1 billion to $70 billion.